Pre-release announcement
MEDM for Windows NT
I thought some people would be interested to know that I have almost finished
porting the latest version of medm (2.3.3) to Windows NT. It currently runs in
both edit and execute mode. There a number of relatively minor problems
which need to be fixed before it is released.
I find that one of the nice things about running medm on a PC is that it can be
used from home over a 28 Kbps modem connection. Running medm on a Unix host
and trying to use X over such a connection is pretty hopeless, but running medm
locally means that only Channel Access traffic is using the connection. For
our applications this results in quite acceptable performance.
Using NT to run medm also means that operator interface computers are cheaper
than using Unix workstations. Compared to using PCs as X terminals which are
displaying medm running on a Unix host, the computing load is better
distributed and network traffic is reduced.
The following is a list of the restrictions on the Windows NT version of medm:
- medm was built on Windows NT using the Hummingbird X Development Kit, which
provides the required X and Motif libraries. medm for NT is a "local X
client" and so requires the presence of an X server on the PC. I have been
using Hummingbird's Exceed server. I believe (but have not proven) that
other X servers could also be used.
- XRTGraph is not available for Windows NT, so the Cartesian plot widget does
not work. Note that the Stripchart widget does not use XRTGraph, so it
works fine.
- Printing using the built-in medm tools does not work. However, the
standard NT screen printing utilities work fine. These utilities require a
few more steps:
- PrintScreen button to capture the entire screen to Windows Clipboard or
Alt/PrintScreen button to capture the current window to Windows Clipboard
- Paste clipboard into your favorite application (e.g. MS Word)
- Print from that application
While this process is a little more work it is much more flexible:
- Windows can be resized before printing
- Multiple windows can be plotted on a single page
- Annotation can be added using Word, etc.
- All Windows printers are supported, while the standard medm print utility
only works with PostScript printers
- The "mail" function in the Message Window does not work. This feature is not
particularly important, since there are plenty of other (much better!) mail
utilities available.
____________________________________________________________
Mark Rivers (773) 702-2279 (office)
CARS (773) 702-9951 (secretary)
Univ. of Chicago (773) 702-5454 (FAX)
5640 S. Ellis Ave. (708) 922-0499 (home)
Chicago, IL 60637 rivers@cars.uchicago.edu (e-mail)
or:
Argonne National Laboratory (630) 252-0422 (office)
Building 434A (630) 252-0405 (lab)
9700 South Cass Avenue (630) 252-1713 (beamline)
Argonne, IL 60439 (630) 252-0443 (FAX)